ON LEARNING that The Scarlet Letter, made in 1926 stars Lillian Gish. one begins wondering why it wasn't a project of D.W. Griffith's. The resulting film certainly would have differed radically from the one Victor Seastrom did direct.

Despite differences in content. Griffith's dramatic vision agrees intriguingly with Hawthorne's. He uses apparently straight moral romances to express unsettling notions of behavior. Characters embody not simple virtues and vices, but complex obsessions: the marquis of Orphans of the Storm personifies the insanity of decadence as surely as Hawthorne's Chillingworth contains the full perversity of hellish guilt. At the roots of his complex plot construction lie details quite at odds with the pure sentiments to which his characters aspire. His films form an elaborate psychological autobiography through the diverse characters between whom they alternate.

The remarkable change of tone and import from Hawthorne's to Seastrom's Scarlet Letter can be traced in the distance between Seastrom's and Griffith's drama. One notices it first in Gish's acting. Her hands, which in Griffith persistently fluttered toward face and breast, are held in more tightly or used actually to grasp people. Seastrom gives their pure emotional energy a real application: Gish's gestures, rather than only expressing her spirit. become actions with physical and specific ends.

In one sequence Gish. as Hester Prynne, pursues Lars Hansen (Arthur Dimmesdale) to and fro in an attempt to make him talk to her. Griffith would have depicted his decision by cutting to their two faces: Seastrom cuts to their feet walking along the country road. The physical aspect of the decision, the characters' actions in their real setting, takes over from Griffith's spiritual. abstract tendency. Yet Seastrom's acting style remains melodramatic. If anything Lars Hansen is cruder than Griffith's heroes: his gestures are slower and broader. Where Griffith would concentrate on the face. Seastrom gives us the whole body and thus avoids Griffith's idealistic extremes.

Indeed, Seastrom made a remarkably calm film from a rather violent novel. largely by establishing and developing unified situations. The opening sets the scene and its characters in one long track along the village street. moving back as Puritans walk to church. To establish a social milieu Griffith would have cut between different characters. their homes, their personal peculiarities. Seastrom needs only one long shot that shows the Puritan villagers in a characteristic action and place. He uses the setting strongly and gives us masses of people never developed as characters. This leaves the drama far fewer contending moral and emotional terms. but lets it develop smoothly in one direction.

SPECIFIC sequences are handled similarly. Like Griffith's, or indeed most any director's. they hinge on the decisions of the characters within them. the completion or failure of an intended action. In such scenes Griffith cuts between the entirely separate emotional qualities and quantities expressed by the characters' faces, giving each a completely individual moral position. Splitting the drama's entire moral position. Splitting the drama's entire moral scheme into separate characters. he lets their conflicts play it out. Seastrom deals in shared emotions, unified atmospheres, and his characters' decisions are expressed in walking through rooms or in exteriors. Especially striking is a sequence with Dimmesdale in Hester's house trying to leave, drawn to stay. Seastrom sustains the involvement of the characters in their particular setting- with its details of furniture and dark candlelight- by using long, medium-long takes, cutting sparingly, not cutting away to long-shot till the end. Rather than continuously varying the emotional impact of the drama Seastrom sustains a singly evolving mood through a sequence.

Here he loses the variousness of tone and emphasis in Hawthorne and Griffith. He builds a drama of natural behavior in a specific social, rather than ideal, setting. Griffith's abstractions and idealization disappear and with them the need to assault the audience with quick cutting to put across the characters' emotions. A much more direct realization of his material characterizing Seastrom's work. makes this work simply a powerful rendition of a story of thwarted love.